Micromosaic, showing Piazza of St Peter's, Rome

This late 19th century micromosaic shows the Piazza of St Peter's in Rome. It was made by Luigi Chiasserotti, a master who is recorded as being active from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.

The micromosaic is inset in black Belgian marble and has a painted black frame. A label on the back gives the price as 200 lire.

Micromosaics are built up of hundreds or thousands of minute tessarae - cubes or chips - of coloured glass. They were developed by mosaicists employed by the Vatican Mosaic Workshop who began to fear for their jobs as orders for large-scale mosaics began to dry up in the 1750s. The credit for their invention is generally given to Giacomo Raffaelli (1753-1836), an employee of the Vatican Workshop. He exhibited his work in his private studio in the Piazza di Spagna in 1775. A later guidebook reveals that there were at least twenty mosaic workshops in the vicinity of the Piazza around 1873-4, all frequented by tourists.

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